


nobody wins

by ssa_archivist



Category: Smallville
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-12-29
Updated: 2001-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-01 09:41:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/355121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssa_archivist/pseuds/ssa_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We are all of us aliens to one another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	nobody wins

## nobody wins

by Brighid

[]()

* * *

disclaimer: not mine. don't even have action figures to play with. 

This is the second Beautiful Garbage vignette, utterly unrelated to the first. 

nobody wins  
(Silence is Golden) 

He understands secrets. A grudging part of him even acknowledges the _need_ of them, gleaned from late night conversations between a mother and father whose whispers can never be quiet enough to escape his preternaturally sharp hearing. 

A teenage boy, no matter his planet of origin, takes what advantages he can to stay a half step ahead of well meaning parents. 

But this secret is like no other secret before. It is a strange, alien surge in his blood, it has a hot rush of giddiness and shame to it, it threatens to unmake him. Or perhaps, more accurately, make him _more_ than he's ever been before. He wakes up sticky and hot and twisted up in his bedclothes and he wants, he wants... 

oh, how he wants. 

He understands some things better now. Why kissing Chloe in grade eight had been nothing but warm spit and the sharp metal tang of her braces. Why he'd set Lana up on a pedestal, watched her from afar, worshipped her from afar, somehow always loving her best from afar. 

He suspects that Lex sees this in him, understands it. Pushes him with Trojan necklaces and concert tickets to make him understand it himself. Pushing him to realize that his dreams of her are all chaste, Prince Charming kisses and old-time movie fade-to-blacks, sweet and simple and utterly without heat. Perfect, like roses under glass. 

But this new secret, there's nothing cool or sweet or perfect about it. It churns in his gut, it leaves him sweated and yearning and hungry from the balls up. If Lana is a rose under glass, then this, _this_ is briar roses clutched in the fist, bloody and fragrant and utterly natural. 

This, of all things, is the only _natural_ secret he has, and the only one he dares not tell his parents. Your son, the alien, the one who sees through walls and pulls car roofs up like sardine can lids and floats five feet in the air, he wants to lick the curves of Lex Luthor's smile, taste _his_ secrets. Wakes up hard and wanting him, every 

_fucking_

morning. 

He couldn't stand to see their eyes. He wants to give them credit, wants to believe that not even this could dent the armour of the love that has protected him since the moment they found him lost in the cornfields, but he doesn't _know_ , isn't sure, is afraid that this last thing will put him beyond them once and for all and he's just not ready for that, not ready at all. 

He knows, instinctively, that Lex would understand. Whether or not he _returns_ the feelings doesn't matter, Lex is somebody who understands ... alienation. The lonely road. Wanting. Castles and suits of armour from fashion runways and foils and Ferraris do nothing to hide the soft, speaking silences that sometimes fall between them. He _gets_ Lex in a way that no one else has ever made sense to him before. 

They're both just ... visitors here. 

When they're together, their solitudes overlap, and seem just a little less lonely. 

But the rub, the rub as his English professor likes to say, is that with the one secret comes a host of others. Ones that are not entirely his, held by a promise to his father, held by a deep, very reasonable fear of laboratories and bright lights and diamond blade saws trying to peel back his mysteries, one by one. 

He can ask Lex to keep the one secret, but the others, the others... he doesn't know. He wants to give him credit, to believe the silences they share, the smiles that leave him dizzy and delighted and longing to touch the fragile place at the base of Lex's skull with the tip of his tongue, but ... but he doesn't _know_ , isn't sure, is afraid that these things will put him beyond Lex once and for all and he's just not ready for that, not ready at all. 

So he sits in his loft, chilled only by the cold in his belly, and watches Lana through his telescope with almost grim determination and he wakes up wanting, wanting... 

always wanting. 

And he avoids the gentle questions in Lex's eyes, because while he isn't ready for the truth, not yet ... 

he thinks he's getting tired of the lies. 

**END**


End file.
